Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

Australia has proposed taxing digital giants Meta, Google and TikTok on a part of their revenue to pay for news reporters. The government released draft legislation Tuesday it intends to introduce to Parliament by July 2 that would create a financial incentive for the social media companies to strike deals with news organizations to pay for journalism. The platforms’ criticisms included that the proposal was a “digital services tax” that misunderstood the evolving advertising industry and would fail to deliver a sustainable news sector. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said a monetary value needed to be attached to journalists’ work. “It shouldn’t just be ab…

Whatever you think about the charitable gifts of MacKenzie Scott, no one would describe them as small. The novelist and philanthropist gave away $7 billion in 2025. That’s more than her ex-husband Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has given away in his entire lifetime. But when Scott penned her end-of-year essay reflecting on her efforts, she wasn’t focused on eye-popping numbers or dramatic gestures. Instead, she wanted to spotlight the impact of small, everyday acts of kindness. America the generous “It’s easy to focus on the methods of civic participation that make news, and hard to imagine the importance of the things we do each day with our own minds and hearts,…

Five Grand Slam titles and more than a decade as the world’s highest-paid female athlete. But the fiercest competition Maria Sharapova describes may be the one she’s navigating now. In her second act as an investor, entrepreneur, and podcaster, she discusses what the court never prepared her for: the deals she walked away from, the candy brand she built and ultimately shuttered, and what it really takes to sit across the negotiating table from Nike. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by former Fast Company editor-in-chief Robert Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversatio…

AI agents have already started buying on behalf of customers. Yet most merchants still lack the infrastructure to serve them. That disconnect sits at the center of PayPal’s first U.S. Agentic Commerce Pulse Survey, based on responses from 498 decision-makers across small businesses, mid-market firms, and large enterprises. Nearly 95% of merchants report that they can already track or observe traffic originating from AI agents, including web crawling from systems like ChatGPT and Google Gemini. But only about one in five have structured their product catalogs in machine-readable formats that those same agents can actually interpret and act on in real time. Many also la…

Smokey Bones Bar & Fire Grill, the once-popular barbecue casual-dining restaurant chain, has reportedly abruptly closed all of its remaining locations. The closures suggest a bleak fate for the nearly 30-year-old BBQ brand and come just months after both its direct owner, Twin Hospitality Group, and that company’s parent, FAT Brands, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? Numerous local media outlets across the country have reported that their Smokey Bones restaurants abruptly and permanently closed yesterday, April 28. Those reports include ones from Indiana’s WANE 15, Pennsylvania’s TribLive, and Rhode Island’…

You’re three days into a work trip in a foreign city, running late for a meeting, and you yank the zipper on your carry-on one last time to force it closed. It catches. You pull harder. The slider pops off the track, and suddenly a piece of luggage that cost you several hundred dollars is, for all practical purposes, an open box with wheels. You find a hotel concierge who points you to a cobbler. You buy a roll of duct tape. You miss your meeting. The zipper is the single most common failure point on a rolling suitcase. It’s the part under the most stress every time a traveler overpacks, sits on the suitcase’s lid to close it, or hands the bag to a gate agent to be to…

I joined IBM Research in the early 1990s wanting to be a networking specialist. I spent time in grad school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) working on algebraic coding theory—specifically cyclic codes—for my master’s thesis. Cyclic codes are mathematical patterns that prevent signals from interfering with each other. Think of them as a way to let hundreds of conversations happen in the same room without anyone talking over each other. At the time, I thought that knowledge might never be useful again. But about six months into my job at IBM, serendipity struck. People started asking: is it possible to build a wireless network? Until then, wired…

More than 900 complaints that mention SpaceX or its Starlink internet service have been filed with the Federal Communications Commission over the past five years, according to files obtained through a public records request. The complaints provide a view into how the technology has already evolved into a critical lifeline for some rural U.S. residents. They also provide insight into some of the leading issues that frustrate Starlink customers, including variant—and sometimes disappointing—internet speeds, as well as poor customer service. The documents obtained by Fast Company come from the FCC, the federal agency that regulates telecommunications providers. Cus…

On April 27, jury selection began at the Oakland, California, federal courthouse for a high-stakes legal showdown between tech CEOs Elon Musk and Sam Altman. Outside the building, a giant cardboard cutout of Musk (dripping wet in a pair of swim shorts) stared down onlookers, while someone in a robot costume led two protestors around in chains. These visual spectacles are part of a larger protest that’s emerging around the trial—which began with opening arguments on April 28—and the two widely disliked tech bros at its center. The trial stems from a lawsuit, filed by Musk in 2024, which argues that ChatGPT-maker Open AI and its CEO, Altman, abandoned the company’s orig…

The Miami Grand Prix, hosted at the Hard Rock Stadium’s 3.3-mile Miami International Autodrome, will look and feel different this year. In its fifth year, the race will spotlight the city with new experiences, activations like the MSC Yacht Club, and new sight lines for spectators. While relatively new to Formula 1’s 24 Grand Prix race season, the Miami GP’s agreement to serve as a host city until 2041 is an indicator that F1 is focused on investing in the U.S. market. It’s a big departure from F1’s history. “ We used to turn up in the U.S., race, and [then] expect everyone in the U.S. to continue to stay in love with us, engage with us, and that was probably ar…

Almost everyone’s power bills are going up, but if your home still relies on old-school electric resistance heat or a conventional electric water heater, you’re likely feeling it even more. A new report breaks down how much you could save by switching to a heat pump instead. A single-family home could save an average of $1,530 a year, or $23,000 over the lifetime of a heat pump, according to an analysis from the energy-focused nonprofit RMI. If every potential house across the U.S. made the switch, customers would collectively save more than $20 billion annually, and avoid around 38 million metric tons of CO2 emissions. (Because of modeling challenges, the analysis do…

Flipbook feels less like just another AI product launch and more like a small revolt against the dead, rectangular boredom of the prototypical prompt-based AI interface. The project describes itself as an infinite visual browser generated on demand, in real time, where every page is an image and every click opens a deeper visual exploration of whatever caught your eye. Rather than writing a prompt and receiving a torrent of text, with Flipbook you get information from a large language model turned into a beautifully illustrated “book” page that you can click on to drill deeper into a topic. And oh boy, it feels fantastic to me. The idea is both fresh and familiar…

Promoting the wrong person is expensive and happens all too frequently. Anywhere from 30% to 50% of executive hires fail within the first year and a half. Workhuman, an employee management platform, has created a new AI tool, Future Leaders, to help improve promotion decisions. The tool, which the company announced on Tuesday, can “pinpoint high-potential employees likely to become senior leaders three to five years before promotion.” CEO Eric Mosley told a crowd at Workhuman’s annual conference in Orlando, Florida, about Future Leaders, saying the company tested it by setting its data to the year 2020, “when we were all watching Tiger King.” The tool was able to…

For most of human history, the idea that work should be “fun” would have seemed, at best, absurd and, at worst, offensive. Consider a Roman galley slave chained to an oar, or a medieval serf bound to land and lord, or a 19th-century textile mill worker inhaling lint in a windowless factory. Even professions we now romanticize—such as blacksmiths, sailors, or early physicians—involved long hours, high risk, and minimal autonomy. Work was, in essence, a necessary burden: dangerous, monotonous, and rarely chosen. The notion that it should also be somewhat enjoyable would have seemed like asking for dessert during a famine. Against that backdrop, the past century, an…

It’s interesting to think about what the world looked like for America’s Founding Fathers. 1776 wasn’t just a revolutionary year for giving birth to America; it also kicked off the first Industrial Revolution with James Watt’s invention of the steam engine, and modern capitalism with Adam Smith’s publishing of The Wealth of Nations. Many of the debates we have today about economics, industry, and politics would have been nonsensical in 1775. For people living at the time, feudalism, mercantilism, and the divine right of kings seemed the natural way of the world. They never experienced anything else. But after 1776, everything would change. We appear to be going …

You know the scenario: It’s nighttime. You’re cozy under the bed covers, drifting off to sleep. Then, your eyes fly open. Wow, that was a big credit card bill this month. It’s time to make a budget. Your boss made that weird comment yesterday. Are you on thin ice at work? Forget work—are we on the brink of a world war? And what the heck is going on with that weird mole? Before you know it, the worries are flooding your brain. You’re wracked with anxiety—and sleep isn’t coming any time soon. “I think we’ve all had that experience where we seem to spiral at night and, in the morning—in the light of day—whatever you were stressing about the night before sometime…

U.K.-based Wren Kitchens abruptly ceased all U.S. operations on April 23, shuttering all brick-and-mortar retail locations and all of its showroom studios inside The Home Depot stores nationwide. Court documents show that Wren Kitchens filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in the District of Delaware bankruptcy court on April 24. According to social media, the sudden closure blindsided employees and customers. Former U.S. employees, including workers at the company’s manufacturing facility in Hanover Township, Pennsylvania, are now without jobs. Unfortunately, many customers say they are now facing uncertainty, with some saying they’ve demolished kitchens and are still await…

New York City has its obvious icons: The Statue of Liberty; Milton’ Glaser’s I “heart” New York logo; yellow cabs. Lesser known, but no less iconic, is the city’s compost bins. You know a NYC compost bin when you see one. Dirt brown, with a bright orange clasp, they roll out on recycling day, filled with gloriously stinky food scraps. NYC distributed the large brown bins for free in 2024, but not every household got one before the sanitation department OK’d using any bin (55 gallons or less) for composting. Now the bins have been shrunk down to the scale of your kitchen, and we have to admit: We really want one. OnlyNY is selling a tabletop compost bin at the cent…

Whataburger, the Texas fast food chain known for its made-to-order burger, is continuing its planned expansion across the U.S. The “hometown burger place that hasn’t compromised” will open 15 new restaurants by the end of June, according to what the brand recently told USA Today. The chain first announced it would be growing in 2020, after being acquired by BDT Capital Partners the previous year. Shortly thereafter, the fast food joint began launching new locations in new states. It focused its growth most aggressively in Southern states like Tennessee, Missouri, and Florida. At the time, the company said in a press release, that the chain isn’t just growing, but al…

AI has made it easy to generate software code, but some open source projects have stopped taking code submissions from the public, citing a deluge of low quality code or code that doesn’t match project needs. Warp, maker of tools for AI coding, is moving in the opposite direction. It’s making its desktop agentic development environment (ADE) software open source and even encouraging users to contribute new features with the help of AI. The ADE lets humans and AI agents work together to write code. Founder and CEO Zach Lloyd says software developers typically have their own preferences on tools and working styles, and he anticipates the program will let some of …

Today, one of the biggest tech showdowns of the year begins. It’s the day on which the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, and the world’s most influential AI leader, Sam Altman, are expected to appear in court to issue their opening statements in the OpenAI trial. Here’s what you need to know about the high-stakes case. What is the OpenAI trial about? The trial centers around the very public dispute between Elon Musk and Sam Altman. Musk is suing Altman and OpenAI for allegedly deviating from their commitment to keep the company a nonprofit institution, as it was when Musk first invested millions of dollars in the then-upstart between 2015 and 2017. In 2018, Musk…

We’re in our optimization era: Increasingly connected, efficient, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, incapable of giving anything our full attention. But I don’t want to be optimized anymore. Algorithms predict what we’ll watch, AI generates what we’ll read, and marketing systems are built specifically to remove friction from discovery to purchase. Feeds blur together, and messages feel interchangeable. Connection—the thing marketing is supposed to create—has become exponentially harder to achieve. We need to bring the friction back, and that doesn’t come from obsessing over scale. Connection isn’t about reaching everyone at once; it’s about showing up meaningfully in the c…